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Anyone with grand visions of cavernous stadiums, multimillion-dollar television deals and endless scholarships if Canadian schools join the National Collegiate Athletic Association is in for quite a shock, according to the Canadian president of a U.S. college.
Last week, the NCAA voted to open the door to Canadian universities and colleges, a decision that would allow schools north of the border to compete in Division II athletics in the fall. Ian Newbould, the top administrator at North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, N.C., was at the NCAA meetings in Nashville and came away surprised at how the decision was portrayed by Canadian media.
“Thinking it's the big time – it doesn't work that way,” Newbould said. “There would be very few athletes in Division II that got a full ride [fully paid scholarships].”
The former president of Mount Allison University and a native of Guelph, Ont., Newbould is well-versed in Canadian Interuniversity Sport and all three of NCAA's athletic tiers. His school's Battling Bishops compete in Division III, but the small liberal arts college is a stone's throw from powerhouse Division I programs such as Duke University and the University of North Carolina and some of the top Division II schools in the country.
Newbould said a school such as the University of British Columbia, which has spearheaded the push to join the NCAA, would dwarf every Division II college in terms of enrolment, but that wouldn't necessarily guarantee success. “The competition is really good,” he said. “Any Canadian school coming to the States is going to have to work hard.”
The biggest difference, he said, would come in how scholarships are awarded. While NCAA scholarships allow for compensation for room and board in addition to tuition and fees, they are limited in number by sport-specific caps. And aside from marquee Division I sports such as football and basketball, teams are under tight financial constraints.
In Division II, for instance, scholarships are limited to the equivalent of 36 a team in football and 13.5 in men's ice hockey. In some sports, such as men's volleyball, where only 4.5 scholarships are available for each team, many CIS programs would have more athletes receiving scholarships than Division I NCAA programs.
UBC athletic director Bob Philip has said a big motivation for joining the NCAA would be to keep more athletes in Canada. An estimated 1,500 Canadians are competing at U.S. colleges.
But competing in Division II would not necessarily help ease that drain, Newbould said.
“The kids are not getting a free ride coming down from Canada in Division II, and very few in Division I do,” he said. “It sounds more glorious than it is in that sense.
“A baseball player's only going to get one-third of a scholarship. Basketball and football in Division I, sure, that's the big time. TV, full rides, everything – but even the other Division I sports, it's not that way. A lot of students that are going to school on an athletic scholarship, they're still paying a portion of their education.”
Even if UBC opts to join Division I after a few years, as the pilot program would allow, Newbould said there's no guarantee a Canadian school could woo a top athlete away from the U.S. juggernauts. UBC's current athletic budget is small, even by the standards of top-spending Canadian universities, and would be minuscule compared with the big machines fielding top Division I teams.
“You're never going to outcompete the U.S. financially,” Newbould said. “If you've got an outstanding kid – like [NBA player] Jamaal Magloire, who went to Kentucky – who wants to go, you could have all the money in the world, he's not going to stay.”
Simon Fraser University is the only other Canadian school to have also expressed significant interest in making the leap to the NCAA. SFU applied for – and was denied – NCAA Division II membership in 2000.
Geography would play a big role in a decision by UBC and SFU to move, as the majority of CIS competition within the Canada West conference is so far away that flights are needed. NCAA competition would involve games against several top schools in nearby Washington state and Oregon.
